Having signed up for the full Amazon Prime experience over the weekend, I started looking around again to see how proliferate “as a service” is becoming out there...
A quick overview of services I’ve seen or signed up for are as follows:
- Unlimited 2 Day Shipping - Amazon Prime
- Unlimited Music - Spotify, Google Music, Apple Music, Rdio, Amazon Music
- Unlimited Book Reading - Amazon Kindle Unlimited, Amazon Prime Books, Audible
- Unlimited Video Watching - Netflix, Amazon Prime Video
- Unlimited TV Watching - Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Sling.TV
- Food and Recipes at your Doorstep - HelloFresh, FoodApron
- Crafts at your Doorstep - Tinker Crate
- Game Rentals - GameFly
- Specialized Coding for Kids - Tynker (Hour of Code)
- Web Platform (more than just a host server) - Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, AppFog, AppHarbor
- Specialized Wine - Wine of the Month Club
- Specialized Coffee - Gevalia, Starbucks, Several Fair Trade organizations
Phew… I’ve lost count. I’m sure each of these categories has a dozen more “new players” and there are other services I’m not even aware of.
From what I’ve found, there’s always a fine line to take with these services. Am I using them enough to warrant the fee? We do SOOO much purchasing online through Amazon now that Prime shipping is a no brainer. It has saved us tons of money. However, we dropped audible recently because the single book we were using per month wasn’t worth the $15 a month fee we were paying. How much am I getting? We took a 50% off sample for a Gluten Free “food box” club. The snacks were nice, and we got a nice pasta sample, but we polished that off in less than a week. For a family of 4, this wasn’t cost effective for us. Personally, I would need about 3 subscriptions to those coffee of the month clubs to adequately fuel our household drinking. 8^D
Music has always been the biggest “iffy” on my part. I listen to music all day. The variety of stations and types I listen to help keep me focused and motivated during the day. While I work from home, there are those times that I’m working outside the home, or while I’m on one of my work trips, and having the music available becomes something that makes one of the “unlimited” services worthwhile since I can download them to my phone. Sure I have our collection of music pushed up to Google Music, but that doesn’t help for the newer stuff that I listen to. Why pay $7 - $12 for an album when I can consume them all for $10 a month AND download them? Since we transferred over to our own Prime account, I’ve been making heavy use of Amazon Prime Music to try this out. They don’t have the wide selection that other services have, and I’m missing a few of my favorites, but we’ll see how things play out after my next business trip next month.
What “services” are you using? Are you getting the value out of them? How do you keep from “service overload” since a “mere $9.99” a month can add up fast when you have 10 services to subscribe to?